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Once upon a time, kids (in the US) could afford to go to state schools without racking up horrendous debts. Now, the in state tuition in my state (NH) is over

Once upon a time, kids (in the US) could afford to go to state schools without racking up horrendous debts. Now, the in state tuition in my state (NH) is over $28K a year. Education was once a societal priority. Maybe we should, as a society, value educating our populace as much as say, we value imprisoning them? [1] It wouldn’t surprise me that we societally do value it but something is thwarting us from getting what we value. [1] $30-$60K year https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-cost-of-a-nation-of-incarceration/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-cost-of-a-nation-of-incarce...

simonsarris 8y ago
Hello from Amherst NH! I think the problem is the opposite, college as presently exists is something we value far too much. Lots of people go to college and learn essentially nothing. I'd fully support free tuition if and only if college was actually hard and rigorous. Instead for most people it's daycare and I don't think we should subsidize daycare for 18 year olds. https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c9983692e0 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...
cobookman 8y ago
Georgia does it right. The Zell Miller & Hope scholarship + cheap cost of living makes university incredibly affordable. I literally made money while attending Georgia Tech for my engineering degree. 100% of my tuition was paid for by the state
- mhluongo 8y ago
  Important to remember it was paid for from Georgia lotto proceeds, making it a tax on the poor to pay for middle-class education. Disclaimer: Hope recipient
  - cobookman 8y ago
    Tax, "a compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions.". Nothing about the lotto is compulsory or based on income. I don't think its fair to say that its a "tax on the poor". This scholarship has been great for the state overall and was a smart move. Georgia Tech is now a top 5 engineering school in the us, and top 10 worldwide. UGA became a highly ranked University. The tier 3 schools became tier 2, and tier 2 schools tier 1. If it wasn't for this scholarship you'd have overall worse schools, and a brain drain on your hands.
    - camgunz 8y ago
      Lotteries are marketed pretty directly to lower income folks, and you can tell it's working because they're the ones buying most of the tickets. They also spend a higher percentage of their income on it. This is just sort of empirically clear, like do you see lottery signs in upper middle class areas? Nope. You see them in the "poor" grocery stores (not Whole Foods), gas stations, and liquor stores. For maximum convenience, some check cashing/pay day loans have lottery booths too. Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-is-a-tax-on-the-poor-2012-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-is-a-tax-on-the-poor-... > If it wasn't for this scholarship you'd have overall worse schools, and a brain drain on your hands. I mean, if you're OK with this kind of redistribution (FWIW I am too, it makes a lot of sense) then I think we should ask the richest of us to foot it, not the poorest of us.
      - curun1r 8y ago
        They're marketed at that target segment to avoid the problems that came with not providing a state-sponsored version of those services. If you look back at the history of the lottery, it started out as black market, unregulated gambling that led to violence and other crime as the people running the often-fixed games fought over the right to fleece people. The modern, state-run lotteries just provide an outlet for gambling that would happen anyways.
        camgunz 8y ago
        > If you look back at the history of the lottery, it started out as black market, unregulated gambling that led to violence and other crime as the people running the often-fixed games fought over the right to fleece people. I think a game (quoting Powerball here) where your odds are 1:292,201,338 is by definition a fleece. All that happened here is the state is reserving that right for itself, justifying it as taxing a vice. This is a common theme -- look at cigarettes and alcohol -- but in basically every case it's lower income people who are shelling out. > The modern, state-run lotteries just provide an outlet for gambling that would happen anyways. This is a common policy argument (see cigarettes/alcohol above or legalizing drugs), but does this even make sense? White collar crime is pretty rampant, so what if we legalize it and make an embezzling tax? Or human trafficking is a persistent scourge, what if we legalize it and tax it? Furthermore, these vice taxes are regressive flat taxes. If we start legalizing things and replacing the criminality with a tax, really that only opens it up to people with means. It's still ruinous for lower income people to engage with it. Which is -- you probably won't be surprised to hear -- another reason the lottery preys on lower income people. I think we should just admit that this stuff is discriminatory -- a lot on class but at least a little on race.
- eat_veggies 8y ago
  not every state has as an elite engineering state school like Georgia though :/ I got into GT out of state for CS but I'd end up paying like 40k/year so I decided against it.
  - cobookman 8y ago
    Georgia tech didn't always use to be a top 5 engineering school. Through cheaper (than other states) tuition and programs like the hope it rose in rankings
Eridrus 8y ago
One of the surprising things to me is that most people do not actually pay the sticker price, many colleges have needs based financial aid that brings it down, before even talking about things like Pell grants. From reading the headlines it's easy to think that graduating with 100k in debt is normal, but the average is "only" 37k. And the median is lower still (media loan payments at ages 20-30 are $203 vs average $351[1]). Which basically says to me that the issue with student loans isn't so much how expensive college is in general, it's that we have a segment of the population, like the author falling into a trap where they graduate with far more debt than they should. You're pretty spot on about your comments on state support though, FiveThirtyEight had a good piece on how tuition costs at public universities have largely been due to a decrease in government funding: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m... Coming from Australia it's also a bit odd that so many students move to go to university. Most of the people I knew at university were still living with their parents. Partly this is just the concentration of the population in a few major cities, but I think it's also the general trend of building universities close to population centers, and maybe less strong differentiation between university profile sin different regions. [1]https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/ https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/
paulddraper 8y ago
> Maybe we should, as a society, value educating our populace as much as say, we value imprisoning them? Even with college as expensive as it is, there are literally an order of magnitude more college students than prisoners in the US (22m vs 2.2m). Making it cheaper would of course further alter that. Naturally, education is important. But there's no way to hand out college educations without (1) significant changing what the average education is or (2) significant lowering the average standard of living. --- These articles are always about people who wanted to go to very expensive private schools (see item 1). There are tons of reasonably priced universities. I went to 1. University of Florida (public school) which even without one of the easy Florida scholarships is $3200 per semester tuition. 2. Brigham Young University (religiously affiliated private school) which even without one of its academic scholarships is $2800 per semester. Without savings, scholarships, tax credits I could literally cover one year full tuition with a 40 hr/wk $10/hr summer job.
hackerman12345 8y ago
> Now, the in state tuition in my state (NH) is over $28K a year. https://admissions.unh.edu/tuitionfees https://admissions.unh.edu/tuitionfees Looks like 18.5k$, which is still about 8.5k$ higher than most other states.

simonsarris 8y ago

Hello from Amherst NH! I think the problem is the opposite, college as presently exists is something we value far too much. Lots of people go to college and learn essentially nothing. I'd fully support free tuition if and only if college was actually hard and rigorous. Instead for most people it's daycare and I don't think we should subsidize daycare for 18 year olds. https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c9983692e0 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...

cobookman 8y ago

Georgia does it right. The Zell Miller & Hope scholarship + cheap cost of living makes university incredibly affordable. I literally made money while attending Georgia Tech for my engineering degree. 100% of my tuition was paid for by the state

mhluongo 8y ago
Important to remember it was paid for from Georgia lotto proceeds, making it a tax on the poor to pay for middle-class education. Disclaimer: Hope recipient
- cobookman 8y ago
  Tax, "a compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions.". Nothing about the lotto is compulsory or based on income. I don't think its fair to say that its a "tax on the poor". This scholarship has been great for the state overall and was a smart move. Georgia Tech is now a top 5 engineering school in the us, and top 10 worldwide. UGA became a highly ranked University. The tier 3 schools became tier 2, and tier 2 schools tier 1. If it wasn't for this scholarship you'd have overall worse schools, and a brain drain on your hands.
  - camgunz 8y ago
    Lotteries are marketed pretty directly to lower income folks, and you can tell it's working because they're the ones buying most of the tickets. They also spend a higher percentage of their income on it. This is just sort of empirically clear, like do you see lottery signs in upper middle class areas? Nope. You see them in the "poor" grocery stores (not Whole Foods), gas stations, and liquor stores. For maximum convenience, some check cashing/pay day loans have lottery booths too. Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-is-a-tax-on-the-poor-2012-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-is-a-tax-on-the-poor-... > If it wasn't for this scholarship you'd have overall worse schools, and a brain drain on your hands. I mean, if you're OK with this kind of redistribution (FWIW I am too, it makes a lot of sense) then I think we should ask the richest of us to foot it, not the poorest of us.
    - curun1r 8y ago
      They're marketed at that target segment to avoid the problems that came with not providing a state-sponsored version of those services. If you look back at the history of the lottery, it started out as black market, unregulated gambling that led to violence and other crime as the people running the often-fixed games fought over the right to fleece people. The modern, state-run lotteries just provide an outlet for gambling that would happen anyways.
      - camgunz 8y ago
        > If you look back at the history of the lottery, it started out as black market, unregulated gambling that led to violence and other crime as the people running the often-fixed games fought over the right to fleece people. I think a game (quoting Powerball here) where your odds are 1:292,201,338 is by definition a fleece. All that happened here is the state is reserving that right for itself, justifying it as taxing a vice. This is a common theme -- look at cigarettes and alcohol -- but in basically every case it's lower income people who are shelling out. > The modern, state-run lotteries just provide an outlet for gambling that would happen anyways. This is a common policy argument (see cigarettes/alcohol above or legalizing drugs), but does this even make sense? White collar crime is pretty rampant, so what if we legalize it and make an embezzling tax? Or human trafficking is a persistent scourge, what if we legalize it and tax it? Furthermore, these vice taxes are regressive flat taxes. If we start legalizing things and replacing the criminality with a tax, really that only opens it up to people with means. It's still ruinous for lower income people to engage with it. Which is -- you probably won't be surprised to hear -- another reason the lottery preys on lower income people. I think we should just admit that this stuff is discriminatory -- a lot on class but at least a little on race.
eat_veggies 8y ago
not every state has as an elite engineering state school like Georgia though :/ I got into GT out of state for CS but I'd end up paying like 40k/year so I decided against it.
- cobookman 8y ago
  Georgia tech didn't always use to be a top 5 engineering school. Through cheaper (than other states) tuition and programs like the hope it rose in rankings

Eridrus 8y ago

One of the surprising things to me is that most people do not actually pay the sticker price, many colleges have needs based financial aid that brings it down, before even talking about things like Pell grants. From reading the headlines it's easy to think that graduating with 100k in debt is normal, but the average is "only" 37k. And the median is lower still (media loan payments at ages 20-30 are $203 vs average $351[1]). Which basically says to me that the issue with student loans isn't so much how expensive college is in general, it's that we have a segment of the population, like the author falling into a trap where they graduate with far more debt than they should. You're pretty spot on about your comments on state support though, FiveThirtyEight had a good piece on how tuition costs at public universities have largely been due to a decrease in government funding: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m... Coming from Australia it's also a bit odd that so many students move to go to university. Most of the people I knew at university were still living with their parents. Partly this is just the concentration of the population in a few major cities, but I think it's also the general trend of building universities close to population centers, and maybe less strong differentiation between university profile sin different regions. [1]https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/ https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/

paulddraper 8y ago

> Maybe we should, as a society, value educating our populace as much as say, we value imprisoning them? Even with college as expensive as it is, there are literally an order of magnitude more college students than prisoners in the US (22m vs 2.2m). Making it cheaper would of course further alter that. Naturally, education is important. But there's no way to hand out college educations without (1) significant changing what the average education is or (2) significant lowering the average standard of living. --- These articles are always about people who wanted to go to very expensive private schools (see item 1). There are tons of reasonably priced universities. I went to 1. University of Florida (public school) which even without one of the easy Florida scholarships is $3200 per semester tuition. 2. Brigham Young University (religiously affiliated private school) which even without one of its academic scholarships is $2800 per semester. Without savings, scholarships, tax credits I could literally cover one year full tuition with a 40 hr/wk $10/hr summer job.

hackerman12345 8y ago

> Now, the in state tuition in my state (NH) is over $28K a year. https://admissions.unh.edu/tuitionfees https://admissions.unh.edu/tuitionfees Looks like 18.5k$, which is still about 8.5k$ higher than most other states.